Jason Taylor's Bloody Sock

This was from the Rams game. Hard to tell. (By John McDonnell - TWP)

If you've been carefully scouring the Skinsophere in recent days, you know that Jason Taylor's calf wound continues to bleed. "He's playing football, for gosh sakes, not walking down the street," Jim Zornsaid of the bloodflow on Monday. "The bandage keeps getting smaller, so that's good news," Zorn said yesterday. "There's a lot less blood, there's a lot less oozing. That's kind of gross," he added, apologetically.

Well, more oozing woulda been grosser. But what you might not have realized was that Sunday's blood was visible to the naked eye, through the uniform. Meaning one comparison was inevitable.

"Yeah, that was hot, did you see his sock?" Casey Rabach asked me. "It was all red. Kind of like Curt Schilling, but amplified. It was cool."

"We had quite a bit of blood come out," Taylor said. "It's still bleeding. It's been a month and it's still bleeding, but there's nothing I can do about it."

I asked what he did with the bloody sock; "put it in a little red bag and threw it away," he said. "You're playing football so you're pressing on it. A lot of strain on it, a lot of pressure building up down there. You don't want the pressure to build up on the inside and I guess you'd rather it come out, but we need it to stop bleeding and start healing better."

Overall, his general attitude toward the bloody sock was nonchalance. I asked some other players about blood on the field, and most of the stories weren't particularly dramatic, but it sure sounds different from the NBA, where blood sends you to the bench.

"Like trickles of blood just on the field? Yeah," Devin Thomas said. "There's probably a lot of guys that have nicks and cuts, nothing major though."

"Yes I've bled on a football field," said Ryan Plackemeier, the punter, although his blood came when he was a high school linebacker.

"Nothing big all the time," Anthony Montgomery said. "Little specks."

Finally I asked Fred Smoot for his thoughts on Taylor's bloody sock; "I was probably bleeding somewhere too, so I didn't see it," Smoot said. So, lots of blood out there?

"Of course," Smoot said. "Easy. Even the simplest scratch or strawberry, it starts to bleed through your pants, and then when you get a real deep cut it's gonna continue to bleed. So blood is something you're going to see over that green grass and white lines out there, lots of blood sweat and tears."

not related to this post, but steinberg, I read this on the post that Gilbert doesn't plan on voting.

"However, some players still refuse to get excited about the election. "People get sour-faced when you talk about politics and voting," said Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas, adding that he doesn't plan to vote."